“Post-truth” is a word that has come to prominence as the Western liberal elites are angsting and spinning about their defeats in Brexit and the US presidential election.

The Oxford Dictionary declared ‘post-truth’ its word of the year 2016. FT added “A less verbose way to describe the same phenomenon would be to say it was the year in which emotion trumped fact. Or cruder still, it was the year of the lie.”

Mr Trump is the leading exponent of “post-truth” politics—a reliance on assertions that “feel true” but have no basis in fact. His brazenness is not punished, but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power.

tempting to dismiss the idea of “post-truth” political discourse—the term was first used by David Roberts, then a blogger on an environmentalist website, Grist—as a modish myth invented by de-haut-en-bas liberals and sore losers ignorant of how dirty a business politics has always been. But that would be complacent. There is a strong case that, in America and elsewhere, there is a shift towards a politics in which feelings trump facts more freely and with less resistance than used to be the case. Helped by new technology, a deluge of facts and a public much less given to trust than once it was, some politicians are getting away with a new depth and pervasiveness of falsehood. If this continues, the power of truth as a tool for solving society’s problems could be lastingly reduced.

A ship’s crew abandons their human cargo of pilgrims, breaking all naval traditions. A young junior British officer Jim is one of them. At a court of inquiry he is questioned in great detail over what happened and in partucular his own actions; the other members of the crew having run way again. He is publicly censured for his actions, and stripped of his qualifications.

The above quotes reflect the narratot’s view of his state of mind at the inquiry.

*LORD JIM is a classic story of one man’s tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under the circumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known world which made Conrad’s work so immediately popular. But it is also the book in which its author, through a brilliant adaptation of his stylistic apparatus to his obsessive moral, psychological and political concerns, laid the groundwork for the modern novel as we know it. With An Introduction By Norman Sherry. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/30813/lord-jim/